Promise

Meet Promise Bula. She is 19 months old and is photographed here with her mother Falida Chigwenembe, who is 18. Promise was born and is growing up in the Balaka district of Malawi, 3 hours by car from the capital Lilongwe. Mother and daughter travelled from their home village to Lilongwe, to meet me last week.

Falida explained to me how an mHealth maternal messaging service guided her through her pregnancy with Promise and provided her with vital information, on a week-by-week basis. Had it not been for this messaging, received straight into the palm of her hand on her mobile phone, Falida would have relied on part hearsay and part infrequent visits to her Community Health Worker, stationed at the nearest Health Facility, 6 km from her home. As I see it, this weekly SMS is the equivalent of a quick glance at “What to Expect When You Are Expecting” or similar, taken completely for granted in so many countries around the globe.

Falida is lucky. She owns a mobile phone. Mobile penetration in Malawi is under 35% and in rural areas, where 80% of the population lives, is lower still. The result is that maternal messaging (SMS or voice, depending on the literacy level of the receiver) is often accessed on a mobile phone belonging to a male member of the household. For now though, the message content is infinitely more important than the means of delivery.

Promise is exactly like the thousands of other children under 5 that I encountered along the road side when travelling in rural areas of Malawi last week, with happy smiling faces, playing in the rainy-season mud and wholly committed to their own fierce agendas of survival.

Malawi

What a week. Prior to my trip I had really no pre-conceptions about what I would encounter there and how I would be impacted by the experience.  My trip to Malawi was part of the first engagement process for the GSMA’s mNutrition initiative, which commenced in September 2013 and which sits under the Pan-African mHealth Initiative, focused on the launching of interoperable, sustainable and scalable mHealth services across Africa.

First engagement by the mHealth team with both current stakeholders and potential mHealth partners in Malawi has provided much information (see recent blog post). There are a number of fledgling mHealth projects, in pre-pilot and pilot stage, as well as some established initiatives operating across the length and breadth of Malawi’s rural districts.

mNutrition

mNutrition will be implemented in 10 countries. Work has already commenced in Malawi and Nigeria and will be followed by Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. Each country plan encompasses three major streams of activity:

1. Development of a scalable and sustainable business case amongst a consortia of public and private stakeholders
2. Support of the implementation of mNutrition services
3. Replication of mNutrition services by documenting and sharing of best practice resources and tools

As I see it, Promise is a wonderful example of a successful mobile health initiative, with a very tangible outcome. Life.

For more information on the GSMA Mobile for Development mHealth, please contact us on [email protected]. For information on various mHealth initiatives, click here. For more information on GSMA mHealth resources, click here.